The present invention is broadly concerned with using a dispenser carried in a locking drawer of a storage cabinet to insure patient prescriptions are filled with the proper medicament and the pharmacy worker replenishes and maintains the dispenser with the proper medicament while also tracking medicament inventory quantities and other medicament specific information for each patient prescription.
Over the years, the pharmacy industry has matured into an industry that dispenses medicament to patients from bulk stock bottles to keep up with the ever increasing demand of new medicaments, treatment plans and regimens, and more patients. These increased supply demands have occurred in the pharmacy industry while a significant decrease in pharmacies was occurring as a result of pharmacy consolidation and acquisitions. An ever present pressure exists within the pharmacy to reduce dispensing costs and drive down the overall cost of patient prescriptions while maintaining the highest prescription quality level and minimizing medication errors.
Medicament dispensing equipment has been employed by pharmacies to increase the pharmacy staff productivity, insure quality and reliability of prescriptions filled for patients, and drive down prescription filling costs. The primary approach used in pharmacies has been to deploy medicament dispensing equipment for the highest volume medicaments dispensed within a pharmacy. As a pharmacy's prescription volume increases, additional medicament is placed in the dispensing equipment to further reduce costs, and increase productivity of the pharmacy personnel.
This approach to deploying dispensing equipment works due to the fact that prescription dispensing is not linear across all medicaments stocked by a pharmacy. A typical pharmacy may carry approximately 1500 unique bulk medicaments that will be repackaged into smaller patient prescription quantities by the pharmacy workers. A small fraction of these bulk medicaments represent a high percentage of dispensed patient prescriptions. This allows the pharmacy to utilize automatic medicament dispensing equipment for this small fraction of the total formulary to greatly reduce the patient prescription dispensing time. By using medicament dispensing equipment, the actual patient waiting times are reduced while increasing the customer satisfaction and reducing the pharmacy labor costs.
Current medicament dispensing solutions include those produced by the assignee under the trade name of Baker Cell™ and Baker Cassette™ and shown in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,111,332 and 4,869,394. The Baker Cell™ places each medicament in a dispenser hopper attached to a dispensing unit for use by high volume pharmacies where speed of dispensing a specific formulary is desired. The Baker Cassette™ places each medicament in a separate drug cartridge sharing a common dispensing unit and is used by low to medium volume pharmacies.
A medicament dispensing solution available from Innovation Associates, sold under the trade name of PharmAssist™ and shown in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,907,493 and 5,884,806, places each medicament in a separate dispensing unit. The medicament container is an integral part of the dispensing unit which cannot be removed for cleaning, maintenance, or replenishment at a workstation that allows easier access to the bulk medicament stored separate from the dispensing units and to allow the other dispensing units co-located in a common drawer to be returned to an operable dispensing condition. The PharmAssist™ dispensing cell has an annunciator LED for indicating to the pharmacy technician which dispensing cell has completed its dispensing process and is ready for the pharmacy technician to retrieve. However, in a high volume pharmacy where the equipment is installed, the pharmacy must rely upon several pharmacy technicians and pharmacists to handle the workload. In these high volume pharmacies, the dispensing cell annunciator LED is inadequate to insure the correct pharmacy worker retrieves the medicament from the dispensing cell for a specific patient prescription; leading to a potential medication error.
A medicament dispensing solution available from ScriptPro, sold under the trade name ScriptPro200™ and shown in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,897,024 and 6,161,721, places each medicament in a separate dispensing cell and uses a robotic vial manipulator and dispensing unit. The dispensing unit is brought to the dispensing cell by the robotic vial manipulator for medicament dispensing.
In today's pharmacy, the medicament dispensing systems must continue to dispense medicament while being maintained and replenished with medicament from bulk stock bottles. These dispensing systems are simultaneously operated by several pharmacy workers performing different tasks. Several pharmacy technicians and pharmacists may be using the medicament dispensing system at the same time to dispense patient prescriptions. The pharmacy inventory specialist or pharmacy technicians may be replenishing the depleted dispensing cells with medicament under the supervision of the pharmacist. Other dispensing cells may require cleaning or maintenance to insure optimal performance.
To efficiently dispense patient prescriptions, the dispensing equipment must inform the pharmacy workers of the current state of each dispensing cell. The pharmacy workers must be informed when each dispensing cell has completed the dispensing of a patient's prescription and clearly identify which pharmacy worker should retrieve the medicament from the dispensing cell. Likewise, the pharmacy workers must be informed when the drug cartridge or dispensing cell requires maintenance that may occur while operating, or due to cleaning intervals based on a prescribed time interval or quantity of medicament dispensed by the dispensing cell.
The present medicament dispensing systems are limited in their ability to operate in pharmacies requiring each patient prescription retrieved from the dispensing unit to be verified and recorded as to the pharmacy worker performing the operation. These medicament dispensing systems lack the ability to operate efficiently when utilized by several pharmacy workers retrieving patient prescriptions from the dispensing unit or when replenishing or maintaining the dispensing cells because the medicament dispensing system must restrict access to a single dispensing cell at a time to insure the pharmacy worker access.
The present medicament dispensing systems do not include a method of operating the medicament dispensing equipment to insure proper replenishment from bulk medicament in stock bottles by an authorized pharmacy worker while tracking the medicament specifics for batch information, lot number and expiration dates.
The dispensing equipment must insure it is properly replenished with medicament by the pharmacy worker as directed by the dispensing computer. The dispensing computer must record and verify the pharmacy worker, drug cartridge, and bulk medicament specifics to insure the proper medicament is poured from the bulk medicament stock bottle into the drug cartridge.
The dispensing computer must provide a process of verification and authentication to insure the drug cartridge is replenished with the proper bulk medicament and restrict the replenishment to authorized personnel only. The dispensing computer should provide a product verification step that allows the pharmacist to delegate the inventory and replenishment tasks to a trained pharmacy technician while knowing that accidental replenishment mistakes will be detected and the dispensing computer will then prevent further prescription filling from the dispensing cell and drug cartridge until the problem has been corrected by the pharmacist.